Fry looked around the landscape, with its homesteads scattered across the hills, their lights just starting to glint in the dusk. How many more horrors were waiting for someone to discover on farms that were still unsold and undeveloped? It was impossible to tell. Did they all harbour dark histories that would one day have to be explored, a grim bequest for generations to come? Were farmers and their families even now wrapping their Christmas presents in the knowledge of some terrible secret buried a few yards away?

God knew what might have happened in some of these farms in the past. They were isolated and cut off from the world, with far too much space to bury their sins unobserved, with no risk of strangers nosing around.

All of that was falling apart now, of course, the modern world intruding in all kinds of ways, the farming families disintegrating, the farms themselves toppling like dominoes into dereliction or re-development. And not before time, in Fry’s view. It was the advance of the twenty-first century, modern ideas of justice cracking open the Pandora’s box, tearing apart the dusty web of old beliefs and superstitions, like the steel nozzle of a hose thrust into a crusted cesspit. Decontaminating minds, the way the clean-up crews would decontaminate Pity Wood. And that would be the end of the story.

Fry shuddered at a sudden chill. Someone walking over her grave. Wasn’t that the saying?

‘Diane, did you ever read a Sherlock Holmes tale called “The Copper Beeches”?’ called Cooper from the back of the house.

‘No. Was that the one with the giant dog?’

‘No, not the one with the giant dog. This story was set in the countryside, though. Kent or Sussex – somewhere like that.’

‘So?’

‘There’s a line in it that rang a bell with me. At one point, as they’re travelling out of London, Holmes says to Doctor Watson: “There’s more evil in the smiling and beautiful countryside than in the vilest alleys of London.” Something to that effect.’

‘Really?’

‘His explanation was that people are able to get away with things unobserved in the country that they never would in the city, where there are always other people close by.’

‘I see. Well, it was true in this case, Ben.’

‘These days, it’s the other way round,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s cities where people go around unobserved. No one takes any notice of what you’re doing. They don’t care if you’re abusing your children or making bombs in your front room. Here, though, people do actually care what their neighbours are up to.’

Fry looked at Pity Wood Farm, its diseased walls held up by scaffolding, its roof tiles slipping into holes that let in the rain, plastic sheeting rattling miserably.

‘The trouble is,’ she said, ‘it still doesn’t prevent the evil.’